Disclaimer/Story/whatever: I’m a fan of VOIP against IRC chatting and I’m trying to move the Italian community toward VOIP. I decided to write this article to help people to configure their Fedora Talk account (but of course, this article is general purpose ) (you can find some information on the official fedora Talk website)

Why VOIP? VOIP has pros and cons. On communication we get a lot of advantages: fluid discussion, lot of time saved, less typing, my brain while I have to moderate a IRC meeting, and so on. By the way VOIP is a pretty new technology and is not yet simple to use, crappy software, firewall issues are two of possible problems.

After a lot of time testing different account and software I found a possible combination that seems to work fine!

In Linux world we have basically two softwares: Ekiga and Twinkle. I used Ekiga for a while without great results. I though that twinkle was crappy, but after Paul Friedls told me it works fine, I tried and he was right! Despite Twinkle has an horrible – old 1999 style – Qt3 interface it’s faster and stable (and support pulseaudio!!).

Enabling VOIP account on Fedora Talk

Read here.

Configuring Twinkle with Fedora Talk account.

You can find the same informations on this useful video, made by Clint Savage.

When you start Twinkle first time, you can choose to use the wizard or the editor configuration.. Using the editor, you have to choose the name of the profile, then you arrive in a form to fill with information about the user (here the official guide).

In the User tab:

• Your name: insert your Fullname
• User name: your fedora username
• Domain: insert the domain, for fedora Talk use talk.fedoraproject.org
• Realm: leave blank
• Authentication name: use your fedora username
• Password: use your fedora voip password that’s different between your FAS password, you will find in your Voip FAS section informations

In the SIP server tab:

• Registrar: talk.fedoraproject.org

In the Presence tab, you can enable “publish availability on startup” (not sure is implemented in the fedora talk infrastructure)

Using

You can do some tests calling:

• 1001 (1001@talk.fedoraproject.org) that read you some sentences
• 1002 (1002@talk.fedoraproject.org) that’s a echo test service

For conferencing you can take a look here.

Troubleshooting

Here some information about some problems that con occurs:

Flash: Ensure flash and adobe s**t is not running before you start twinkle/ekiga or a call. If yes, you will not be able to use the audio device and (my proposed solution).

Microphone

Remember to enable the microphone. Some computers, in particular laptops have two input channels: mic and front mic (the jack mic and the embedded laptop mic respectively). To enable it you should use (i use and it works) alsamixer, but with pulseaudio when you launch it, you see only the pulseaudio channel. To see the below layer (ALSA layer) you have to use:

alsamixer -c 0

and, using TAB key go to Capture tab and modify input source from mic to front mic or vice versa. You can modify also input volume and other settings. enjoy!